A Story With ‘The Grip’: The Lost City of Z
Since childhood I’ve been fascinated by stories – be they those of Paul Harvey, which I listened to or read with regularity or those told by my colorful uncles at our family reunions. Since college and an excellent class on Spanish-Mesoamerican contact (which coincided with the 500th anniversary of Columbus landing in the ‘new world’), I’ve been entranced by stories of conquest and discovery and what happens when individuals and cultures encounter one another. That interest was deepened after traveling to Peru two years ago and doing more research on the conquest of the Incan Empir
e.
A new release which has scratched my itch for stories about contact between cultures is David Grann’s The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon. It is a very satisfying read which kept me turning the pages wondering, what will happen next? A movie, based on the book and starring Brad Pitt, is in pre-production now and slated for release in 2010. Here is how Grann describes coming to his love of adventure stories:
Every quest, we are led to believe, has a romantic origin. Yet, even now, I can’t provide a good one for mine.
Let me be clear: I am not an explorer or an adventurer. I don’t climb mountains or hunt. I don’t even like to camp. I stand less than five feet nine inches tall and am nearly forty years old, with a blossoming waistline and thinning black hair. I suffer from kertoconus – a degenerative eye condition that makes it hard for me to see at night. I have a terrible sense of direction and tend to forget where I am on the subway and miss my stop in Brooklyn. I like newspapers, take-out food, sports highlights (record on TiVo), and the air-conditioning on high. Given a choice each day between climbing the two flights of stairs to my apartment and riding the elevator, I invariably take the elevator.
But when I’m working on a story things are different. Ever since I was young, I’ve been drawn to mystery and adventure tales, ones that had what Rider Haggard called “the grip.” The first stories I remember being told were about my grandfather Monya. In his seventies at the time, and sick with Parkinson’s disease, he would sit trembling on our porch in Westport, Connecticut, looking vacantly toward the horizon. My grandmother, meanwhile, would recount memories of his adventures.
